Kevin Fox, Jr.

With Drive-Away Dolls, Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen channel their influences and experiences into a tight, satisfying, humorous road movie. A knowing and humorous tone never loses its flair, with an artistic touch and commitment that makes you buy into the jokes in the first place. It is a refreshing comical experience threading together the absurd and the authentic.

Despite solid performances and hints of daring brilliance, Lisa Frankenstein feels disposable because its winks and nods downplay its uniqueness—not to mention that we are in the third decade of being perpetually awash in nostalgia for and satires of the 1980s.

American Fiction is a satire about how far up our own asses writers can fit our heads, confronting and interrogating the concepts of genius, self-regard and good taste.

The Iron Claw focuses intimately on the Von Erich brothers, painting a tender and forlorn picture of their misfortunes, but it’s hard to call it unflinching.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts keeps it simple enough, which is smart, because franchise creep is going to hit like a ton of bricks within a sequel or two, especially given its ending. Rise of the Beasts isn’t quite as intimate or grounded as Bumblebee, but neither is it as cumbersome or dull as the other Transformers movies.

If you like fight scenes, fast cars and great actresses appearing for brief periods to give exposition, do I have a movie for you. Fast X asks you to shift your brain into low gear, power over a bumpy road of uneven dialogue, and hang on for some tight turns and incredible leaps—in the air and in logic.

Huesera may have needed more scares or a darker ending to push it over the top, but as is, it’s a thoughtful meditation on choice, love and the anguish of expectation, dressed in the clothing of a clear-eyed, anxious body horror.

Wendell & Wild could get weighed down by these heavy themes, but its combination of satire and silliness keeps it light on its feet.

While genre veterans may effectively point at what and where it borrows, Smile will positively terrify casual fans of horror. It’s creepy, dreadful and jumpy.

For all the hubbub and controversy in the last few weeks leading up to release, it’s an at-best entirely ordinary movie carried almost entirely by Florence Pugh’s performance.

The Woman King is confident of its indulgences—a few moments of melodrama, a natural but questionable romance subplot—because it earns them. It invests in its characters so that each new wrinkle feels meaningful. It may feel like an assemblage, but I could stand to sit longer in the beautiful space it cobbles together.

Despite effectively crafting character conflicts and jokes around the messy business of moving life to the stage and then moving it from the stage to the screen, See How They Run feels like it’s missing some punch. It’s certainly clever, but almost too much so.

Day Shift’s gory, cheesy, vampire-hunting comedy-action film starring Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco is exactly what you expect, and that’s a good thing.

I’ve seen a lot of good movies this year, but Carter is a challenger to Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once for “Most Fun.” It’s also easily the most violent and visceral, on par at least with The Northman, but at a higher rate of corpses-per-minute.

I had a good time with Bullet Train. I didn’t hate Bullet Train. I just think that I’ll begin to forget Bullet Train, and in remembering that I’ve forgotten it, I will resent it because I’m an easy mark for crime films and an easy mark for action movies—including but not limited to cheeky R-rated action-comedies

The most emotionally captivating moments focus the film’s themes about the relationships people form with their pets, and the senses of duty we feel to the ones we love, all of which gives DC League of Super-Pets a big heart.

Karmalink is a very good story about child detectives trying to make do in an imbalanced and unfair world. Like Inception, it nods at the human desire to escape into our dreams, and like much of sci-fi, it grapples with human reliance on technology. Some of the most interesting implications go unexplored, but it’s beautiful to look at and delights where it treads.

While informative and worth watching, it’s much more of a self-authored back-pat than a critical exploration of a career or the justice system at large.

Neptune Frost is a powerful film, clean and digestible while it traffics in metaphors and deploys poetry and philosophy.

Buck and the Preacher is a classic and iconic Western—brightly colored, beautifully assembled and channeling social issues through its plot rather than tacking them on in an obvious or distracting manner.